The square is transient space
where every hour
a thousand purposes
collide and split away.
Yet some moments linger,
hover in shifting light
among the trees,
settle in the pavement cracks.
That weeping ash
taller than rooftops
grew from graves,
its slow roots stabbing down
between the tombstones,
piercing eye sockets and yellowed bones,
and sucking nourishment from
the clammy loam
Grave yards beg a church
and one stood here,
where tourists take selfies, lick ice creams
and children stamp their feet
to scare the birds.
Crammed between the slaughtering yards,
the butchers’ shops and narrow alleyways
an ungainly barn, all awkward angles,
a stumpy tower.
The church of Christ the King
a place to mark time
the saints in their proper seasons:
Advent, Christmas, Lent and Corpus Christi
each celebrated with prayer and candles
and ashes on good Friday.
And sinners had their moment too
where every day was different
and every day the same
sprinkling at the font
rings before the altar
corpses by an open grave.
All kept in proper fashion
and all this for eight hundred years.
Now jugglers mark their sacred space with rope
where blood and incense once hung in the air
and where our forbears bowed their heads in prayer
a bunch of skinny kids are smoking dope.
The Top Banana 